Newspapers – what could they do differently?

After reading this brilliant rant against the established media, mainly News Limited’s criticism of Google, I eventually arrived at the ‘yeah but’ question.

Newspapers have repeatedly struggled with the internet due to a lack of understanding on its mechanics and the power of the internet to substitute them.

They’ve attempted different business models and all the while alienating users due to their constant change.

One such attempt was content subscriptions. Two examples were Reuters and Fairfax. Reuters won because they learned the key is distribution to enhance someone else’s website. Fairfax failed because they thought they were the centre of the universe and tried to make the reader pay. Unfortunately as a business model most choose to follow the Fairfax and most of these attempts have now disappeared.

But it hasn’t been all bad either. Newspapers do get a lot of traffic, their websites do make money from advertising. This in itself is a great platform to begin truly exploring their potential on web.

So what do they have as assets?

1. Content creation
2. Established advertising sales capability
3. A brand that signifies the quality, subject and/or politics of the content
4. Existing real estate to launch
5. Existing ad trafficking technology

If you had just one of these assets you’d be on to a winner. So four has to be a winning formula. So here are some things that Newspapers could do quickly, that enhances the web and changes the business model.

Enhance my ecom website

Like Reuters on our share trading website, why don’t newspapers explore how they might enhance ecommerce websites. Book reviews, product reviews, movie guides, news and other content all make for better ecommerce websites. It is expensive to do yourself if you aren’t in the business of doing it. Distribution should not be precious, just add a self service content shop to your own website they every web owner can subscribe to.

Sell advertising for others

APN in New Zealand run advertising networks for other websites. They take too big a cut for my liking but it is the right step in leveraging the trafficking technoogy and sales force reach.

Crowd journalism

If you want to become part of the web, stop editing and open your pages to people to become the commentators and journalists. The reason blogs and aggregators are killing you is that they do not moderate to an agenda or stop real contribution.

Having a comments page at the bottom is not contribution, it’s a sop. Allow people to add their voice to the article and even develop the story for you. Readers are more likely to read your news and follow a story as it is develops. It could be so simple by letting users tweet the story on the page.

Don’t stop aggregation, embrace it

Stop pretending you own the news and start understanding you only have ownership of the paper or web page you print it on. If you change your perspective you will put your efforts where they should be – in distribution. The wider your distribution, the more ways you will find to make money from it.

An example of this is affiliate networks. I have a widget that I sell on my site. I also let others sell my widget on there website for a cut of the revenue. You could apply this to news by opening up your content for others to make money from with their own news site. Properly delivered you could get a fee per impression of their advertising revenue. It works where your brand lends credibility to the affiliates website.

Don’t create content, use someone else’s

Editorial teams now have a great choice of picking up quality stories from blogs and aggregators. Now you just have to sell the adverts.

Think cable

Recognise that you have the possibility of scale unimagined. Stop writing stories for your own mass market publication and write for syndication and delivery on a global scale to particular market niches.  The same as cable TV.

Get into the new portals

Why can’t I see my news on Facebook?

Change the mindset

All up, these are not big leaps but they do require a change of mindset from a market for ‘the paper’ to a market of ‘me’.

Embrace the internet

Having a conversation the other day it dawned on me that businesses, outside of the cool kids in marketing, really haven’t started to embrace the internet yet.

An example where the way an HR department worked. They interviewed candidates only in their city. If someone wanted a job and they were from a different city they had to get themselves to that city to interview. Interestingly, their cousins in training have great interactive tools everyone can access.

Another example was a legal department. They feared the internet and all the bad things it could do to them. Especially email. The perception of an interruption of privacy because ‘this stuff’ appeared in their room on their computer. And they hadn’t ask for it! Seemingly they missed the point of the internet.

The conclusion I came to was that businesses were not embracing the core concept of the internet – instant, limitless  distribution of information. And the newer concepts of interaction and communication.

We’re now beginning to see the start of Web 3.0 – the read/write web. A great talk on this is here at TED by Kevin Kelly. Most of these concepts for read/write have been around for a while but have waited for more open systems and bigger pipes. XML is a great example.

Yet the majority of business is being left behind because they haven’t yet  embraced web 2.0.  Some of these older technologies available to them can make them more efficient or provide them a competitive edge. But the technology sits on the shelf.

So even though this sounds like the same broken record everyone else plays, perhaps businesses can start looking at ideas like the following and join the cool kids in marketing. After all, the internet isn’t just a place to advertise jobs.

1. Skype interviews: Get the skype address from your candidates and interview them online. You can do it at your desk with a mic and camera. I means you can meet and filter those you don’t want and get them out of the office quickly. Especially for internet based jobs, you’ll easily know if someone is hooked up and plugged in when they ask you what skype is.
2. XML your investor relations releases: On the stock exchange for example there is no real reason why businesses can’t XML their corporate disclosure news straight to the exchange. It would be instant disclosure and instantly distributed to those investors subscribing to the feed. It also means investors get the information at the same time as their broker.
3. You can also RSS your newsletter, which is something we’ve had reasonable success with in article marketing. If you have it in RSS you can push to publishers who can choose to pick it up. If it is interesting your newsletter has become a great external marketing tool.
4. Instant message your account and project management: This is common in the internet world and not unseen for some of the larger bsuinesses like banks or insurance companies. But why just business to consumer. If you have a high touch account or project that you’re billing anyway, IM will provide that instant communication that will help you work through issues and solutions and save a few meetings and a fair bit of travel time.
5. Wiki your system documentation: A great service from an IT company would be to share a wiki with your customers. I know all you software people have one, you share it between your developers. But why not publish one to your customers? It can show them how you are developing the technology road map, what solutions other customers are consuming and invite feedback as you go to help improve your product. It’s business social marketing. Your customers can talk and sing your praises turning it into a great marketing tool as well.
6. Limewire your application: P2P networks have great distribution capability for businesses who want others to trial and test their software. It doesn’t have to be kids stuff, send business stuff down the pipes and see who picks it up. Someone somewhere is always searching for a software solution and P2P is an ignored area by businesses.

So as we move into read/write web don’t forget you might not have used yet.